Wrong Country

MY MOTHER GOT MARRIED

I continue posting the first part of my memoir for my readers who started reading later, in 2024.

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut

Three Aunts Niura

When I returned to Voronezh from my summer at the Ural Mountains, I found some changes in our apartment. Our kitchen lost its function; the storage room became a kitchen, and a woman named aunt Niura occupied the kitchen room. (We use the word ‘aunt’ in two ways: to refer to a relative or to identify or address any woman.)

After the death of our grandmother, Boris and I were left with no supervision. Someone had given my mother the brilliant idea of offering a room free of charge to a single woman who would look after us after school. My mother found Niura.

If you are called Niura, it means you are from the village and love sunflower seeds. Also, you speak illiterate Russian. My mother forbade Niura from cracking sunflower seeds in our apartment, but she had to accept the rest. Niura was working a night shift at the same Tire plant where my mother worked in the daytime and was happy to leave the workers’ dormitory where four women lived in one room, to have a separate room, even a kitchen, and to have it all free of charge. What did she do for it? Not a lot, as I remember.

We had breakfast with our mother in the mornings and happily or unhappily ran to school. After school, we usually entered our apartment quietly because Aunt Niura would be asleep after her night shift. I don’t exactly remember who prepared our meals, but I think it couldn’t have been aunt Niura. Our mother never liked cooking and didn’t know how, but still, she had to fix at least something for us.

In the kitchen, a former storage room, we prepared our meals on a kerosinka-- a paraffin stove. The kerosene odor in the air was strong; fortunately, this new kitchen had a window. Cooking on this stove was cumbersome and dirty because the kerosene wick burned very slowly and produced a long, sooty flame, leaving our pots sooty. Who cleaned that soot? I do not recall, but not my mother because of her manicure. Aunt Niura? Me?

Aunt Niura’s supervision was elemental: she mostly kept us in our two rooms, and she stayed in her kitchen- room. I don’t recall how long she lived in our kitchen, but one day she disappeared. Our mother told us that aunt Niura had gotten married, though we had never seen any of her wooers in our apartment. So, several days later, we had another aunt Niura. Like the first one, she didn’t play any role in our lives. But she was our working mother’s insurance that everything (at least, physically) was ok with us.

One day, our second aunt, Niura, left our kitchen. Now, I understood she had married, just as our first aunt Niura had. Soon, the third Aunt Niura appeared in our kitchen. All our neighbors started talking about an unusually lucky situation with our Niuras. First, it was uncommon for all three to have the same name -- Niura. Actually, Niura is one of many nicknames for the first formal name Anna. Ania, Anechka are more prevalent in a city; Aniuta, Aniutka, and Annushka are more commonplace in the country; Niura is Anna’s least popular, deeply provincial short name. And here we are: three Niura women in our apartment, one after another. Second, two of them were married soon after coming to us. So, the neighbors suggested that the third Niura would also be married before long because, as the Russian proverb says, God loves the Trinity. They were right. The third aunt, Niura, did get married.

After those three lucky coincidences with our Niuras’ marriages, our neighbors concluded that the subsequent marriage would be — our mother!

II

Our neighbors’ prediction -- realized

One Saturday evening in May, our mother came home from work and startled us with an announcement: she was going to be married and very soon. A man is coming to meet us tomorrow morning, she declared. And just as she had announced, the following day, we saw a man in his fifties, sturdy, medium-height, overweight, and not very attractive. His face looked solemn; he rarely smiled. Our mother introduced him as Kazimir Ustinovich Zlatkus. Not a Russian name. He brought us a lot of candy, Zolotoi Kliuchik (little gold key), a whole kilogram (about two pounds). Never before have we had so much chocolate candy in our frugal home.

Next Saturday, our mother told us that she will spend the night at this man’s home, and they will expect us for brunch the next day. She wrote down his address and left. That was very unusual since she always slept at home. It meant there would be serious changes in our lives.

The man’s address was not far from our street, and Boris and I went there the following day for brunch. Our mother was all smiles (very unusual) when she opened the door to us in a beautiful dressing gown, which was new to us. The apartment was smaller than ours, but the building looked snootier. The brunch was simple yet tasty. I still remember the milk sausages’ tenderness and the fresh butter taste in the soft mashed potatoes. Since our grandmother’s death, our meals at home have been primitive.

But our encounter with K. U., as we abbreviate his long name, did not presage anything exciting.

Soon they were married. We understood it only because we had to move to K. U.’s apartment. I guessed he did not desire to move to our plebeian building. His apartment building was erected for the engineering and technical staff of the Tire Plant. The windows of his apartment looked onto the pleasant, small park. The front yard had some trees and benches for the elderly, who had plenty to gossip about when we moved into the building. While nobody seemed to notice us or say ‘hi,’ they all watched us. ‘All’ meant all the people of the seventeen apartments of this privileged residence.

Everybody knew everyone else, and, of course, they knew K. U. and had known his late wife. They might not have known him well because he was taciturn, but his late wife had never worked and could have spent much time on the benches. I did not know how long she had been sick, but everyone attended the funeral when she died, including my mother. And forty days have not yet passed, K. U. married again! What a scandal! He brought his new wife (and her two children) to his and his late wife’s apartment, to their conjugal bed, just as Shakespeare's Claudius and Gertrude did.

Mother was already 35 or 36, so I did not consider her young, but still, K. U. seemed too old for her; he was at least 15 years her senior. With his puffy face and plump figure, he looked unhealthy. I could not understand this marriage. Apropos, he was her boss when she began working at the Tire Plant; maybe he had been in love with her since.

Our new family life started in the K. U. small apartment.

The apartment had 1.5 rooms. (Exactly, as Josef Brodsky’s parents’ apartment in Leningrad.) A half room had a window but no door, a heavy portiere instead; it served as a bedroom for K. U. and his past and present wives. We got what used to be a living room before. I had my mother’s old bed; Boris slept on the sofa. K. U. put a small desk in the kitchen for our studies. Boris never studied, so the desk was practically all mine. Luckily for me, we went to school in different shifts, Boris in the morning and I in the afternoon, or vice versa. The mornings were my favorite when I could be alone in the K.U.’s apartment.

One day, a sum of money disappeared from the apartment. Neither Boris nor I had known that money was there in the first place. But Boris had brought home some boys while I was in school. There was a big scandal when K. U. discovered money was missing. The punishment was degrading. K. U. began to lock the room when he left for work with our mother. Only when they were back was the room unlocked, so we could use it.

Our life with Boris was limited to the kitchen for a long time. I felt deeply humiliated and hated both K. U. and my mother. K. U. never apologized, but later in life, I forgave him since he never had children of his own and did not know how to manage or understand us teenagers. He was an older man, distrustful and afraid of burglaries. He always asked us to lock the room and hide the key in the small hall before we left the apartment. His fear came from a Russian habit of keeping money at home rather than in a bank; Russians seldom used banks, as I recall.

I never forgave my mother for her callousness, even cruelty toward us, her children. Some years later, on my visit to Voronezh, I reminded her of this episode, but she had not apologized, although she was embarrassed.

After school, I often walked home with a group of schoolgirls. It was a cheerful crowd, and whether poor or excellent pupils, we all felt liberated after our classes. We chattered away, giggled, and told funny stories. I did not know the girls well; they were from different grades, but I enjoyed my time with them. However, as I approached my building, my mood grew gloomier and gloomier. With a strained smile, I would tell the girls goodbye.

I would enter my building, ascend to the second floor, get out the key to the apartment, open the door, and find myself in a small hall. The door on the right is locked, on my left is a bathroom, and in front of me is our tiny kitchen, my claustrophobic “domain.” It is not, in fact, mine; it belongs to Kazimir Ustinovich. The apartment’s main room, with all my (actually, only a few) belongings, is locked. Of course, I have a book to read, but being locked out gives me such a sad, humiliating feeling that a book no longer brings me the usual joy. And, of course, I cannot invite my friends into this ‘prison’ cell, which adds a feeling of shame and loneliness.

PS.

In my last visit to Voronezh from the USA, K.U. had been more talkative than usual and told me the story of his arrest during the Stalin Terror in Leningrad. I learned that he was Lithuanian, although I had always taken him for Latvian, since he was born in Riga. This mixture, I expect, was strange not only to me but at the time of his arrest to more dangerous NKVD. They came for him at night. The city was drowned in darkness. Only the prison —old, infamous Kresty — had been illuminated, he told me. (The Tsar’s prison was built in the form of a cross- krest.) The cell was packed. He saw complete incomprehension, hopelessness, and despair in the faces of the cellmates. And fear. Investigators beat the arrested until they confessed to the invented by NKVD crimes. K. U. told me he was a young, strong man then. They beat him for several days. He did not sign the charge of espionage for capitalistic Latvia or Lithuania (I forgot what country exactly they wanted to stick to him). They let him go. At that time, he was a simple worker at the Red Triangle, a tire production plant. Stalin was destroying the intelligentsia, especially the old prerevolutionary ones or young, creative, and freethinking, like my father and his 24 literary friends, whom Stalin sent to different labor camps in the Gulag. K. U.’s social origin as a worker saved his life.